Exercise of royal power in early medieval Europe: the case of Otto the Great 936–73

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David Bachrach

Current scholarly orthodoxy holds that the German kingdom under the Ottonians (c.919–1024) did not possess an administration, much less an administrative system that relied heavily upon the ‘written word’. It is the contention of this essay that the exercise of royal power under Otto the Great (936–73) relied intrinsically on a substantial royal administrative system that made very considerable use of documents, particularly for the storage of crucial information about royal resources. The focus of this study is on Otto I’s use of this written information to exercise royal power in the context of conﬁscating and requisitioning property from both laymen and ecclesiastical institutions. Introduction Ottonian politics is not easy for us moderns to grasp. Quite apart from its being so much about inheritances and feuds within or between kinships, it largely lacked anything which we can recognize as an administration or a bureaucracy, such as we historians have tended to think of as the spine of any body politic which they study. Ottonian rule was not, in Max Weber’s terminology, bureaucratic but patrimonial.1 Given the depth of Henry Mayr-Harting’s knowledge regarding Ottonian historiography and his well-deserved reputation for thorough scholarship, it cannot be doubted that he has accurately set out the orthodox context in which he places his 2007 study of the church of Cologne under the leadership of Archbishop Brun.
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Henry Mayr-Harting, Church and Cosmos in Early Ottonian Germany: The View from Cologne (Oxford, 2007), p. 3.

Indeed, in 1928 Marc Bloch, looking back over more than a generation of scholarship, observed that scholars specializing in the history of medieval Germany tended to ignore the problem of administration all together, a tendency that he compared unfavourably with the historiographical tradition in France.2 Taking up the question of Ottonian administration in 1979, after a historiographical gap of almost a century going back to the work of Georg Waitz, Karl Leyser concluded on the basis of an impressionistic investigation of a small selection of the relevant sources that the German royal government operated on the basis of ‘a modest array of institutions’ and very little use of written documents.3 In contrast with even this mildly optimistic view of governmental capacity, however, in an important article of 1989 Hagen Keller, a leading specialist in Ottonian history, speciﬁcally rejected the idea that the Ottonian government had any administrative capacity. Keller asserted baldly: ‘Despite the continuity of the idea of empire and the model of Charlemagne, everything that was of particular importance for high Carolingian imperial organization – centrality, ofﬁce, law-giving, and writing – was absent in its successor states. Indeed they simply came to an end.’4 Writing a decade later in 1999, Gerd Althoff defended the provocative subtitle of his work on the Ottonian dynasty, Die Ottonen:
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Königsherrschaft ohne Staat, by simply asserting the absence of royal administration of any type, much less written administration.5 Against this historiographical tradition must be set the realities of Otto I’s rule. In the course of three and a half decades (936–73), Otto had a record of extraordinary achievement in many facets of public life. In the realm of military affairs, Otto and his military commanders launched dozens of successful campaigns of conquest in the Slavic east as well as in the Italian kingdom; the latter Otto eventually conquered and incorporated into his empire in 962.6 Otto launched a massive invasion of the west Frankish kingdom in 946 during the course of which he established himself as the hegemon in west Frankish affairs.7 The king weathered two major civil wars (938–9, 953–4) in which he overcame the array of military and political forces commanded by his brother Henry, his son Liudolf, the dukes of Swabia, Franconia, and Lotharingia, as well as numerous
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Gerd Althoff, Die Ottonen: Königsherrschaft ohne Staat (Stuttgart, 2000), p. 8: ‘Mit den konstitutiven Elementen moderner Staatlichkeit – Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung, Ämterorganisation, Gerichtswesen, Gewaltmonopol – läßt sich Königsherrschaft im 10. Jahrhundert nicht zureichend erfassen.’ This study, which is a popularizing adaptation of Althoff’s collection of essays, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde, takes as its central premise that the Weberian model of the state is the appropriate benchmark against which to compare the Ottonian and Salian kingdoms. See the devastating review of Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997), by Howard Kaminsky in Speculum 74 (1999), pp. 687–9. Although sympathetic to Althoff’s effort to project the Ottonian kingdom as a Weberian ‘archaic’ polity, Kaminsky emphasizes Althoff’s, ‘slack way with his Latin sources. These are quoted in German translations that are sometimes wrong but that are not corrected by reference to the Latin originals (usually quoted in the footnotes), themselves sometimes misunderstood. Some of the mistakes are serious, and one or two are tendentious’ (p. 688). The corresponding Anglophone tradition before the publication of Mayr-Harting, Church and Cosmos, is neatly summed up by John W. Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany c. 936–1075 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 5: ‘Since the Ottonian and the Salian kings lacked the governmental infrastructure of the Carolingian kingdom and empire at the height of its power, they governed less through their representatives or written instructions sent out from the court and generally had to make their will manifest in person. There is little doubt that the Ottonian kings made less use of the written word in government than the Carolingians had at the height of their power. In fact, the east Frankish kingdom of the Carolingians already used the written word in government less than did its west Frankish or Italian contemporaries’ (my emphasis). For an overview of Otto’s military campaigns within the context of Ottonian and Salian warfare, see Bruno Scherff, Studien zum Heer der Ottonen und der ersten Salier (919–1056) (Bonn, 1985). Concerning military organization of Germany under Henry I and Otto I, see Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach, ‘Saxon Military Revolution, 912–973?: Myth and Reality’, EME 15 (2007), pp. 186–222; and David S. Bachrach, ‘The Military Organization of Ottonian Germany, c. 900–1018: The Views of Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg’, Journal of Military History 72 (2008), pp. 1061–88. For the most part, the administrative aspects of Ottonian military organization have been ignored by specialists in both German and military history. See the discussion by David S. Bachrach, ‘Memory, Epistemology, and the Writing of Early Medieval Military History: The Example of Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg (1009–1018)’, Viator 38 (2007), pp. 63–90, particularly pp. 63–70. For a discussion of this campaign, see Les Annales de Flodoard, ed. Ph. Lauer (Paris, 1905), s.a. 946, and the new English translation The Annals of Flodoard of Reims 919–966, ed. and trans. Steven Fanning and Bernard S. Bachrach (Peterborough, 2004); and Widukind, Res gestae Saxonicae, MGH SS 3, 3.3 (Hanover, 1839), p. 451.